


The Minor Fall, the Major Lift

by JustAPassingGlance



Series: Edge of the World [1]
Category: Glee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2018-03-07 20:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3181304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAPassingGlance/pseuds/JustAPassingGlance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He asked every day. “Please?” Begged in the morning.<br/>Asked again during his brief moments of clarity, normally in the mid-afternoon. “Please?”<br/>“Please.” Whispered into silvered curls in the dead of night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Minor Fall, the Major Lift

**Author's Note:**

> warnings for major character death/assisted dying

All three of the windows were covered by heavy drapes. The same ones that had been up for the last ten years. Opening them had been the first thing they did in the morning and closing them the last thing they did before they went to bed. Now they stayed closed almost all day, except for an hour at sunset when the one nearest the bed was twitched back to let in a glimpse of the outside world.

“Please,” croaked Sebastian through dried and cracked lips. “Please?”

Pressing his lips together against the sob rising in his throat Blaine frantically shook his head. “How can you ask that of me?” He finally choked out. “I can’t, Seb. I just can’t.”

“It’s hurts.”

Blaine knew it hurt and it killed him every day to watch his husband like this. But the doctors said they still had time, months even.  _Months_. “We need you. I need you.”

“Not like this. The kids shouldn’t have to see me like this.”

Strictly speaking they weren’t kids anymore, all three of them decades out of their teens and busy leading their own lives. But they had dropped everything the moment the diagnosis had been made to dote on their father. It had been difficult for all of them to watch the transformation of the strong man they idolized to a withered away shell but they had been by his side the whole way.

Maybe it was selfish, but Blaine wasn’t ready to wake up in a world that Sebastian wasn’t a part of. Even if most days the person in bed with him wasn’t the same person he had known for the last 67 years. He was still Blaine’s and Blaine was still his and he wasn’t ready for that to change.

—

 _It hurt_.

Not that Sebastian was a stranger to pain. He’d suffered his fair share over the years- bones broken, bruises gained, stitches needed.

This wasn’t like that.

This went so deep it had become a part of him. Grafted itself onto every cell of his body. There wasn’t a word for it. More than agony, beyond torment. It just was.

Some days it was all he was.

The medication was coming soon, he knew. To dull and numb him. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide his suffering. Blaine would insist and he wouldn’t be able to protest.

It wasn’t what he wanted. None of it was.

—

They had a dog once. A birthday present to Maddie. She had been a beautiful hound, standing tall and proud even when all she was doing was watching the laundry as it spun through the washer.

She lived to 13, then had gotten too old, hips inflamed with arthritis and head too heavy to lift off the floor.

It had been a kindness to her.

Why couldn’t it be the same to him?

—

He asked every day.

“Please?” Begged in the morning.

Asked again during his hours of clarity, normally in the mid-afternoon. “Please?”

“Please,” whispered into silvered curls in the dead of night.

He knew what he was asking. Knew it went against everything Blaine, who had dedicated his life to saving others, knew and believed in.

But what he had left ahead of him wasn’t life. Months, the doctors said, like there was hope there. Months more of exactly this and worse.

It wasn’t life, even if it was living.

—

He never said a word to her, but somehow she knew.

“Where are they?” She asked again, arms crossed over her chest and determined glint in her eyes. People always chalked those similarities up to genetics but there she was, unmistakably a product of him, despite her fly-away reddish gold hair and azure eyes.

“Mads…”

He loved all three of his children equally but the bond between the two of them was undeniable. Without her he had no idea how he would have made it through the failure of his first marriage. Spence hadn’t even been able to walk at the time and Nate was still years away from being conceived. Only she remembered. His baby girl who, at the age of four, had decided it was her life’s duty to protect her father.

“Blaine won’t do it, will he? You’ve asked. It’s why you’ve been fighting.” He hadn’t been Blaine to her in a long time. Even before the ink had dried in the long, drawn out divorce process she had been not-so-subtly dropping hints that their family should include him.

“We haven’t been fighting.” Fighting took energy that he didn’t have.

“But he said no?” It lilted up like a question but the surety with which she pronounced it made it a statement.

“When did you grow up?” He asked instead. Somehow, despite everything, it still felt like only yesterday that he had held her for the first time, wrapped snuggly in her blue and purple blanket. The most perfect thing he had ever seen.

She laughed quietly, letting her hands drop back down to her sides. “I’d say it’s been a good 30, 40 years.” Carefully she clambered onto the bed with him and laid her head gently on his chest.

“Medicine cabinet. Back corner of the bottom shelf,” he whispered as her head got heavier on his chest. Too heavy, really, but for her he could make himself tolerate anything.

When Blaine came in an hour later they were still curled up together, sound asleep. He pulled the blanket up over them before quietly returning to the kitchen.

—

The weeks dragged on. Kids coming and going as their schedules allowed- weekends always spent altogether, and at least one night a week. Not for the first time he was glad that, although they had scattered all over the globe in their youth, they’d all managed to find their way back home.

He still had good days. And even one great day.

With Nate and Spencer’s help he was able to totter out of his room and down the hall while Maddie silently looked one. Once again he took up residence in his office. For half an hour he ran his fingers over everything on the desk. Memorizing the weight and feel of each object and the glossy, smoothness of the wooden surface.

After an hour Blaine came and sat with him. Just like all those times they had taken refuge from the kid’s maniac shouts, leaving Maddie in charge, much to her delight and her brothers’ horror.

“Do you remember when we got this couch?” Blaine wondered, patting at the faded leather.

Sebastian did. It had taken ages to agree on one that would fit under the bay window and in a spark of regained youth they had decided they would move it themselves. After hunting down a friend with a truck the two of them laughingly struggled with it up the front walk and through the front door. It had lived in the hallway for nearly a week before they got it to its final destination. And, in yet another moment of youth (and since both Spencer and Maddie were at friend’s for the day and Nathaniel was sound asleep upstairs) they decided to christen it. Twice.

“We almost broke it before anyone got to sit on it.”

“As I recall you were sitting for part of it.” For a moment the sparkle was back in Blaine’s eyes.

More than anything he hated that his sickness had forced it out.

Gathering his energy he pushed himself up to his feet and staggered the four steps to the couch, Blaine looking on in alarm until he collapsed by his side.

“Don’t scare me like that,” he griped, immediately clasping their hands together.

“I love you,” said Sebastian earnestly. “So much. Have since we were kids.” Even through their decade long separation and his marriage to Jeremy he hadn’t stopped, not really.

“Love you too.” Blaine had taken longer for that, not having fallen until college, but he had loved him fiercely ever since. “Always.”

“Always,” Sebastian repeated.

—

He had thought that Maddie hadn’t heard him, sure that he had waited until after she had fallen asleep. But when he awoke the next afternoon (far later than he should have. Late enough that he knew the streak of good days were a thing of the past. He had a few hours, maybe, until the unrelenting agony was back.) she was sat at his bedside, looking like she hadn’t slept at all, with a pill bottle rolling back and forth between her fingers.

“Yesterday was nice.” It had been so good to get out of his room and see, however briefly, another part of the house. And Blaine’s smile when he first sat down in his old chair was bright enough to light up the entire room.

“Yesterday was great,” she said with a flickering ghost of a smile on her face.

“Where’s your dad?”

“Watching football with Nate and Spence. A recorded game, I think. From sometime during the week.”

“You’ll get them?”

“Yeah. We’ll have to give it a bit. So that-” her lip quivered as she broke off and she took a deep, shaking breath. “F-for timing purposes. You’ll have to keep awake.” The steely glint was back and she could have been three again and imperiously instructing him on how to set up a tea party. 

“C’mere, baby girl,” he held his arms open and again she was crawling in to them. “Are you sure?” He asked seriously, tilting her head back so he could see into her tear-brimmed eyes. “Dad and your brothers-”

“This isn’t about them,” she snapped before softening. “Spence will understand. And Nate. Dad might too, eventually.”

“My brave girl.”

“Gotta be, growing up in a house of men.” She pressed the bottle into his hand and grabbed the nearly full glass of water off the bedside table.

A reassuring weight, her hands pressed into his leg and, despite the tears streaming down both their faces, she didn’t look away as he swallowed down the pills with trembling fingers.

“Thank you,” he whispered when he had finished.

She nodded, lips pressed tight together.

Again he opened his arms to her and once more she fell into them. They clung to each other, bodies wracked with suppressed, muffled sobs.

“Okay,” he said voice splintering over the second syllable as he felt his arms begin to grow tired. “Okay. Go get them.” Firmer this time, because his time for crying had passed. That right didn’t belong to him anymore, not when the heartbreak of his family was his responsibility.

His last act of selfishness.

He always knew he had it in him.

Beside him, Maddie was scrubbing at her eyes and fixing her hair. She was inhaling sharply through her nose before jerkily exhaling but otherwise appeared to be eerily collected. “Love you forever,” she whispered.

“Love you for always,” he answered, pressing kisses first to her left cheek, then her forehead, then her right cheek. They stayed together for another long moment before she rolled away from him and out of the bed.

“Can you open the curtains?”

She nodded and twitched them open one by one. On her way out she made sure to grab the phone sitting on the bedside table.  

The day was getting late and overcast. As he watched a duck glided down onto the pond, skimming the surface for a brief minute before taking off again.

He looked around the room, taking in the eggshell walls, the floor to ceiling bookshelf opposite him, the dresser overcrowded with pictures and trinkets they’d collected over the years. On a chair in the corner sat three stuffed animals- a bear, a cat, and a rabbit, the first toys of all his children. The rabbit was missing an eye and the bear an ear. The cat had a burn mark across it’s back.

With shaking hands he reached back to unclasp the chain around his neck, letting it pool on his lap as he took his wedding ring off it and slipped it back onto his finger. The ring didn’t fit anymore, hadn’t fit in ages with all the weight he’d lost. Blaine had bought him the necklace so he wouldn’t have to stop wearing it entirely.

There was the sound of feet pounding up the hallway and then Spencer was bursting into the room, looking wildly around. Nate and Blaine were on his heels both looking worried and upset. Maddie came at a more sedate pace behind them.

“Mads said you needed us? She looks upset.” Blaine was at the bedside, eyes raking up and down his husband’s body, mentally running a diagnostic.

“Wanted to see you,” he sighed out, taking in his family. Wishing he could see the rest of them, his grandchildren, nieces and nephews and their children. The dull pain of regretful doubt was not something he had been expecting.

“Why-” Blaine’s eyes had worked their way from the bed to the table next to it and, more importantly, the now nearly empty pill bottle that was on it. “No,” he whispered. “No,” said louder and more defiantly as though the force of his conviction could turn his denial into the truth.

“What?” Spencer looked back and forth between his dads in bewildered alarm while Nathaniel was looking over his shoulder at his half-sister, aware that she knew something he didn’t. “What’s happening?”

Blaine dropped onto the bed, fingers seeking out Sebastian’s pulse as he peered into his eyes. “Nate,” he commanded in the calm even voice he hadn’t used since his days working in the ER, “go find a bucket of some sort. We should have something in the garage. Spence, you need to call for an ambulance. Tell them-,” his controlled exterior nearly cracked but he managed to collect himself together again to say, “there’s been an overdose.”

Nate, who had been about to follow his dad’s instructions, froze. “What do you mean, overdose?”

“GO.”

“B,” Sebastian protested weakly. “Stop.”

“No,” he growled. “I’m not letting you do this.”

“Yes, you are.” Maddie was standing in the doorway, blocking her brothers from leaving, chin stubbornly jutting out.

“Don’t talk to me, Madeleine,” snapped Blaine. “I know damn well he didn’t get those himself.”

“Stop,” Sebastian said with a roll of his eyes and a heavy sigh. “It was my choice. You know it was my choice.”

“You’re not leaving us,” Blaine cried out. “Don’t leave me.” His voice wavered and broke and he collapsed in on himself. “Please, don’t leave me.”

In an instant, Nate was at Blaine’s side, wrapping him up in his arms and rocking him even as his own eyes filled with tears. “Dad?” He looked at Sebastian, wide-eyed and imploring.  

“I love all of you, so, so much.” He reached out his left hand and grabbed his husband’s, reveling in the feel of their wedding bands pressing together again. “But… I  _can’t._ ”

The idea of what his future would have in store for him was beyond terrifying. He was already nearly unrecognizable and the idea of further losing himself, to wasting away and becoming a shadow of nothing but still being there was unbearable. Not only could he not endure that himself, he couldn’t ask the people who loved him to have to bear witness to it either.

“Yes, you can. You can. Please.  _Please._ ”

Blaine continued repeating his pleading mantras.

“Can you just… lay with me? Please?”

It was like a mockery of years long gone as the five of them crowded to fit into the bed. Blaine lay pressed as close to Sebastian as he could, touching him as much as physically possible and holding him as tightly as he could without hurting him. Maddie, Nate, and Spence sat around them.

Each made sure to have a hand resting somewhere on their father so even after Sebastian’s eyelids grew too heavy to keep open he could feel them there.

“Love you forever,” he forced out, clear, strong, and unmistakable. Nuzzling closer into Blaine’s shaking body he gripped whoever’s hand was in his (Nate’s he thought but couldn’t be sure.)

He inhaled his husband’s scent, filling his lungs with it and allowed his mind to flood with all the memories it invoked.

He smiled.

He –


End file.
